A thousand details of Bonaparte's oppression have become lost in the general tyranny: the persecuted persons dreaded to see their friends for fear of compromising them; their friends dared not visit them, for fear of drawing down upon them some increase of severity. The unhappy outlaw, becoming as one infected with the plague, lived sequestered from the human race, in quarantine in the despot's hatred. You were well received so long as your independence of opinion was unknown; so soon as it became known, every one drew back; there remained around you none save authorities spying on your connections, your feelings, your correspondence, your proceedings: such were those times of honour and liberty.
Madame de Staël's letters reveal the sufferings of that period, in which talents were at each moment threatened with a dungeon, in which one busied one's self only with the means of escaping, in which one aspired to flight as to a deliverance: when liberty has disappeared there remains a country, but no more mother-land.
Madame de Staël's marriage.
When writing to her friend that she did not wish to see her, from apprehension of the evil which she might bring upon her, Madame de Staël did not say all: she was secretly married to M. de Rocca[392], whence resulted a complication of difficulties by which the imperial police profited. Madame Récamier, from whom Madame de Staël thought it right to conceal her new cares, was astonished, with good reason, at the stubbornness which she displayed in forbidding her the entry of her place at Coppet: though wounded by the resistance of Madame de Staël, for whom she had already sacrificed herself, she persisted in her resolve to join her.
All the letters which ought to have restrained Madame Récamier only served to confirm her in her intention; she started and, at Dijon, received this fatal note:
"I bid you adieu, dear angel of my life, with all the tenderness of my soul. I recommend Auguste[393] to you: let him see you and then let him see me again. You are a celestial creature. If I had lived in your company, I should have been too happy: fate carries me away. Adieu[394]."
Madame de Staël was to meet Juliet again only to die. Her note struck the traveller with a thunder-bolt: to fly suddenly, to depart before pressing in her arms her who was hastening to fling herself into her adversity, was not that a cruel resolution on Madame de Staël's part? It appeared to Madame Récamier that friendship might have been less "carried away by fate."
Madame de Staël went in search of England by way of Germany and Sweden: the power of Napoleon was a second sea separating Albion from Europe, even as the Ocean separates her from the world.
Auguste, Madame de Staël's son, had lost his brother killed by a sword-thrust in a duel[395]; he married and had a son: this son, a few months old, followed him into the tomb. With Auguste de Staël the male posterity of an illustrious woman died out, for it does not revive in the honourable, but unknown name of Rocca.
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